Tempers Flare as New Rules Strain Senate

WASHINGTON — If there is a rock bottom in the frayed relationship between Senate Republicans and Democrats, it seemed uncomfortably close as the final days of 2013 on Capitol Hill degenerated into something like an endurance contest to see who could be the most spiteful.

As the sun rose on Friday, senators had worked through a second straight late-night session — called by Democrats as a way of retaliating for Republicans’ delaying tactics on confirmations. They held their first vote of the day at 7 a.m., confirming Deborah James to be secretary of the Air Force. And absent a compromise, they may still be voting through Saturday, a prospect that has thrilled no one.

“I think it resembles fourth graders playing in a sandbox, and I’ll give the majority leader, Harry Reid, 99 percent of the responsibility for it,” Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee and usually one of the more reserved members, said Thursday.

“He’s going to have ‘The End of the Senate’ written on his tombstone,” Mr. Alexander complained.

Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, called this week “chaotic and confusing, and a shameful waste of time.”

“I am loath to cast partisan blame,” he added, before doing just that. “But the plain fact is that there is a faction of the Republican Party that is essentially insisting on burning through all of these time deadlines.”

Republicans, furious that Democrats last month stripped away most of their power to filibuster presidential nominations, are using every procedural barricade available to them in the Senate’s two-century-old rule book, forcing it to run the clock as long as possible while they vote on a series of President Obama’s nominees.

Democrats, hoping to make the situation so unpleasant for their colleagues across the aisle that they eventually break, are scheduling votes at all hours of the day and night. Mr. Reid is threatening to refuse to let anyone go home until a backlog of dozens of nominees is gone — even if that means spending Christmas Eve in the Capitol.

Mr. Reid has votes planned through Saturday afternoon and will push through another battery of nominations next week, including some that would each require 30 hours of debate, like that of Janet L. Yellen to lead the Federal Reserve.

What members of both parties bemoaned more than anything was not the lack of civility or bipartisan cooperation — which they seem to have given up on long ago — but what they said they see as the irreversible damage inflicted on an institution they claim to revere.

“If Bob Byrd had been here he would have had a stroke,” said Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, referring to the late Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, the senator whom Republicans and Democrats hold up as the embodiment of senatorial dignity and forbearance.

Some senators expressed concern that this moodier, more intemperate Senate would become the norm now that Democrats have unilaterally changed filibuster rules.

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Senators Ted Cruz and John McCain waited for an elevator after voting on President Obama’s nominees.CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times

“It’s the beginning of what we were worried about,” said Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, one of just three Democrats who did not support the rules change. “It’s just concerning, very much concerning, where it goes from here.”

The Democratic push was producing results as the Senate confirmed Cornelia T. L. Pillard, one of the nominees at the heart of the fight with Republicans over the filibuster, to the country’s most powerful appeals court, the District of Columbia Circuit, shortly after 1 a.m. on Thursday by a 51-to-44 vote.

As the day wore on, several other nominees were confirmed as well: Chai Feldblum to serve as a commissioner on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; Elizabeth Wolford to Federal District Court for the Western District of New York; and Landya B. McCafferty to the Federal District Court for the District of New Hampshire, among others.

Republicans complained that instead of tackling the many substantive issues that the Senate should resolve before the end of the year — whether to impose sanctions on Iran, passing the annual defense authorization bill and settling a long-running dispute over federal subsidies to farmers and food stamps — lawmakers were wasting their time on midlevel nominations.

The Senate is a body where one member can slow down just about anything. Much of its business is accomplished through unanimous consent, which allows senators to move quickly through mundane tasks like approving low-level nominations.

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Senator Lamar Alexander headed to one of the marathon sessions.CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times

Republicans have held up the votes on dozens of Mr. Obama’s pending nominees by refusing to provide unanimous consent to waive the time that is allotted for debate. Instead, they are using the debate time to take to the Senate floor to vent.

“Let’s be really frank,” said Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky. “Senate Democrats have for petty partisan reasons taken away the power of Congress, taken away one of the checks and balances on a rogue presidency.” Earlier in the day, Mr. Paul told the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call that he did not think there would be anything approved by unanimous consent “until hell freezes over.”

Like the many paralyzing partisan squabbles before it, this one left its combatants confused and disheartened about how it had spiraled so out of control.

Senator Angus King, a first-term independent from Maine who usually votes with Democrats, brought his toothbrush and a change of clothes on Wednesday. He said he had an uncomfortable night on a couch that was about eight inches too short. And when he rolled over in the morning, he set off the motion sensor that turned on his office lights.

The experience drove home for Mr. King a stark realization: This is no way to run the Senate. “It’s not a very constructive use of time,” he said. “I don’t fully understand it.”

With that, he walked back toward his office. He had a long night ahead. He was assigned to be the presiding officer from 9 p.m. to 2 a.m.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Tempers Flare as New Rules Strain Senate. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe